Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content.

There are several good services that facilitate curation tasks and software can help, but on it’s own, software isn’t the answer.

Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Curating content can provide the best of both. Here are several best practices to help you with curation sources, types of content and where to publish.

Arrange your saved items into stunning collections called wakes. Wakes can be public or private and created on any topic - share a passion, promote your business, or gather research. You can also make your wakes personal by adding notes, reordering items, changing layouts and much more.

Marketers in a content-driven landscape are responsible for producing huge amounts of content, day in and day out. But most of us don’t have the time, staff, or budget to publish enough great (or even good) content. We do the best we can, but it’s often impossible to stay ahead of the demand. That’s where content curation comes in.

Finding and sharing content with your audience is a great way to engage with them. It also a great way to establish thought leadership, so that when they're ready to make a purchase you'll be one of the first ones they'll turn to.

That entire process of finding and sharing relevant content is known as content curation, something the best content marketers do regularly; in fact, on average, 25% of their content is curated content.

A key component of content curation is identifying the ideal topics to curate that will most engage your audience and support your own content marketing strategy.

Content curation is a highly effective inbound marketing strategy and because of this there has been a rise of content curation tools and platforms. So we did what we typically do, we tried to get a good handle on all the options that exist in the market. What follows is our best collection of tools that allow you to easily curate content.

If we missed any tools please leave a comment down below and we will add it to the list.

A quick note about our Ultimate Lists… due to our highly popular list The Ultimate List of Real Time Search and Trending Websites we thought we would do something similar here. Most of all of these platforms we’ve tested, we own or we use. With some we simply give a quick overview but many we add our own thoughts and observations.

Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com's insight:

I use or have used many of these curation tools. It's nice to see the the list on tools is growing. Brands are started to understand the power of content curation.

We are so proud to announce that Scoop.it Content Director now integrates with Hubspot - the #1 Marketing Automation software for SMBs. Below are all the things you could by bundling Hubspot and Content Director - among others -.

As you may already know, we recently joined up with Blockspring to provide access to our Text Analysis API service in their functions library. To showcase what Blockspring and AYLIEN Text Analysis API can do we’ll be sharing some interesting API mashups we’ve built, that we think you’ll find useful.

For this edition we’re going to show you how to build an Automated Content Curation Tool inside a spreadsheet with little or no programming experience.

Design Revolutions Now On CuragamiFinally decided to use @Scoop.it's easy to use embed tool. The tool makes it easy to add content curation to a blog. Simply copy the embed code and your Scoops appear inside your blog.

Why would you want Scoops on a blog? Content curation has more reach and costs less than content creation. Content curation is or can become a big help to content creation.

The "4th Estate" for Scoop.it is finding ways to bring the easy content curation Scoop.it creates with a company's content marketing. Scoop.it's easy to use embed (you embed the feed) bridges the 4th estate of content marketing. Well done!

Content marketing lets you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. You can build your credibility and become a reliable source of information in your field of work. You generally do this by developing original content and sharing it with your audience. However, this puts a lot of pressure to churn out a large quantity of quality content in a limited time frame.

However, building your credibility as a thought leader and a dependable source of useful information doesn’t necessarily require you to constantly create original content. What will work just as well is identifying great content and sharing it with your audience. This will also help build your reputation as a business that really understands their niche.

Creating content for multiple platforms each and every day can be taxing for even the most skilled copywriter. It means coming up with fresh, interesting content constantly to provide great resources for your clients, but I know that we all can have a rough time at it if we go it alone and don’t do content curation.

So how do you exactly go about curating excellent content? Do you just use Google? What if Google does the unthinkable and fails when you are looking for content? Simple; you find content curation tools to help you widen your scope! I am going to look at the top content curation tools you can use to help benefit your content in 2015.

As a sales rep or sales manager, you know that finding relevant content is essential to enable your Social Selling process. Without it, your activity as a sales reps is limited to pitches and conversations with little to no value. Unfortunately, finding relevant content to share every day takes time, and when you do find it, it’s often difficult to get it organized. That’s where content curation comes in. These are a few concepts and tips to ensure that your content cupboard is never empty and that you stay available as a valuable resource to your buyers.

Curating content is one of the ways you can easily sustain your content marketing activities. It involves sorting through existing relevant content on the web about a specific topic, and then organizing and packaging the information for its intended audiences. It’s more than simply collecting links, though.

It also involves annotating the found content and determining how this ought to be packaged and delivered to the public. This is pretty much how a museum curator curates works of art to include in an exhibition, hence the term.

Content curation is in itself a science that calls for skill in spotting and organizing information, and also an art that relies heavily on the intuition of the curator. Here are a few tips on how to curate content for your blog and online marketing initiatives.

n a survey last year of more than 1,500 professionals using content curation, 76% of them said content curation helped them reach their business goals. As content becomes more and more important to achieve success, it also becomes critical to measure how it effectively helps. In fact, as renowned businessman & author Peter Drucker put it, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content.

There are several good services that facilitate curation tasks and software can help, but on it’s own, software isn’t the answer.

Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Curating content can provide the best of both. Here are several best practices to help you with curation sources, types of content and where to publish.

Content creation refers to the content that is 100% unique to you. You write it and you own the copyright. This content can be of any medium; image, video, podcast or text.

To ensure time efficiency, clear messaging and brand consistency, you should only create content when you are sharing information that directly promotes your brand. This can be your promotional posts, quotes, humour and personal posts that represent who you are and what your brand represents.

These posts should add value and ultimately bring your audience one step closer to you.

Your own created content should make up roughly 20% of your overall content strategy. This ensures you are building brand awareness, promoting your products/services and keeping top of mind without being spammy or overly promotional.

Content Aggregation

Content aggregation refers to the content that you pull directly from sources. Often there are certain tools that are used to do this automatically.

When it comes to sharing it on social media, you share it directly as is. This could be the title of the article and a link. You may add a hashtag but there is no additional commentary.

This content as with all content that you don’t own should be attributed to the author.

While this content is really easy to source and share with your social media community, it should be limited to a small percentage of your overall content strategy.

If you rely on aggregated content too often, it will just add to the noise. Think about it, if everyone is simply sharing others content round and round, it’s just the same ‘stuff’ being seen over and over again. It’s not adding value, it’s wasting time, our most precious resource.

If you want your community to stay loyal to your business and brand, it’s so important that you provide a reason to visit and a reason to stay. This means bringing something unique that adds additional value that you can’t receive anywhere else.

This is where content curation comes in.

Content Curation

Content curation refers to the content that you bring to your audience but add additional commentary to. Curating content adds a unique perspective that makes it highly relevant, interesting and valuable to your community. This can be as simple as a comment on a link or identifying key point that readers should focus on.

While content aggregation is ok on occasion, your goal should really be to curate the content you source and choose to share.

80% of the content we share shouldn’t be directly promoting our business but it still needs to be bringing value. Plus, it can be really difficult trying to constantly come up with new content. Content curation solves this problem while helping you stand out above the noise.

Content curation saves you time, provides an opportunity to leverage your knowledge and it pays it forward for the high quality sources you choose to share with your audience.

#content curation is not duplicating content as long as it is focused on content creation and not automation.

It’s important to realize that if you look at content on the web, something like 25 or 30 percent of all of the web’s content is duplicate content. … People will quote a paragraph of a blog and then link to the blog, that sort of thing. So it’s not the case that every single time there’s duplicate content it’s spam, and if we made that assumption the changes that happened as a result would end up probably hurting our search #quality rather than helping our search quality. – Matt Cutts, Google

(From the article): In conclusion, generating high quality content through curation isn’t about automation, aggregation, or duplication of content. If you use the right tools and methodology, you can generate original content with a high frequency that should help you improve organic search results and conversion rates.

There’s so much content being produced on the web right now that I’m truly having a difficult time finding articles of value – albeit through search, social or promotion. I am shocked at how shallow many of the content marketing strategies are on corporate sites. Some just had recent news and press releases about the company, others have an array of lists, others have feature releases about their products, and others only had heavy thought leadership content.

While much of the content is well-produced, it’s often uni-dimensional. In other words, the same messaging focused on the same type of visitor with the same medium… in every piece of content. In my opinion, there are multiple dimensions to a balanced content strategy.

The Content Marketing Institute reported that 90 percent of organizations are marketing with content. And now, Forrester predicts that enterprise content volume is growing at a rate of 200 percent annually. It’s safe to say that most companies are embarking on or are deep into a content marketing initiative.

If your company is just leaping into the mix or is experienced in content marketing, there’s a good chance that you are still grappling with the challenge of figuring out how much content is needed and finding the balance between content creation and curation. Do you need to make or moderate your content?

The solution is not a one size fits all, but it is almost always a hybrid solution with a varying percentage of original versus third-party content, and the formula is based on the type of company, goals of the content initiative, and how much content is already out there.

Right now, companies are generally practicing a ratio of 65 percent created and about 35 percent curated. While that may be the average, that may not be the right balance for every company. We’ve found that 40 percent original, 30 percent licensed curated content, and 30 percent UGC or employee created content. But the needs for every brand is different.

This article is talking about how a business should decide whether to curate information or create it. They explain creation simply as make the information that is unique and making it public. There are a couple of options for curation however. A business can curate third party information or businesses can outsource their curation to a trusted third party.

As a student when they talk about curation, I think about sharing a post on Facebook or copy and pasting a link and posting it. However it is more in depth than that. As technology is improving at an almost exponential rate every year, more and more businesses are coming into the market and fulfilling a niche that has never been seen before. This can be seen with businesses who's sole purpose is to curate information for other businesses.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.